Can Colours in Food Hurt You?

It`s a sad fact, but food is not just food anymore. Over the past 50 years the use of food additives has skyrocketed to the point where very few of us have any real idea exactly what`s in the food we eat. Alarmingly, the rates of diseases such as cancer, obesity, diabetes, autism, depression, asthma and ADHD have also increased dramatically over this time. Every year, Australians consume over 5kg of food additives each, yet how many of us really know what these chemicals do, which ones are safe and which ones are known to be harmful?

Thankfully, not all food additives are harmful. In fact, of the 300 or so additives approved for use in Australia, most of them are safe, well tested and pose no problem for most people. However, there are at least 60 food additives used in our foods which are at best questionable in terms of safety, or at worse, known to be harmful.

At Additive Alert their mission is to provide you with the information you need to make an informed choice about what you feed yourself and your family today, as well as to lobby for changes to ensure we all have better choices tomorrow.

This is an excellent site providing a tool listing in numerical order all food additives currently approved for use in Australia .

You can scroll down the list or you can use the Search Additives function at the side to search by name or number. If there are any known health risks associated with an additive, these comments will appear in the comments field.

If the comments field is blank, this means that there are currently no known health risks associated with that additive.

If you can't find an additive it is probably one that is not approved for use in Australia, but may be used in other countries.

Additive AlertYour Guide to Safer Shopping

The essential information about what`s really in the food you eat, which additives to avoid and why.